Helping facilitate 3,100 projects in 180 countries, the Clinton Foundation is the most powerful reimagining ever of what post-presidency can be. But can the fixer-in-chief work his magic on Haiti?

I am standing under the scorching late February sun in an open field in Haiti's Central Plateau, waiting for the helicopter bearing former president Bill Clinton to arrive and getting a lesson in limes. More precisely, in what The Clinton Foundation, the philanthropic organization of global ambition founded by Clinton in 2001, is doing about limes. It's complicated.

Introduced in the 15th century to Hispaniola (the name Columbus gave the island that now comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic when he shipwrecked here in December 1492), limes were successfully cultivated in Haiti until the 1990s. "Their oil, used in cosmetics and the beverage industry, was, like Haitian vetiver, considered the best in the world," says Hugh Locke, a blan from Westchester (one is acutely aware of skin color in Haiti). Locke heads the Haitian nonprofit Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA) and is scanning the sky, as am I, for Clinton's craft.

During the 1991–'94 embargo of Haiti, organized in response to the military coup that ousted the popularly elected but controversial president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (ironically, Clinton was president then), "farmers couldn't export to the U.S., and lime oil lost its value, so they cut down all their lime trees" to make sellable charcoal. "That is why the Haiti Lime Project," Locke continues, "which is intended to reintroduce several million lime trees to Haiti, is so important."

Individual farmers—SFA is helping them organize into for-profit cooperatives—stand to increase their revenues by $750 annually (a princely sum in profoundly impoverished Haiti, where the minimum daily wage is between 150 and 300 gourdes, or $4 to $8). Furthermore, the presence of the lime trees will counteract deforestation and soil erosion, the country's huge environmental problem; you can see denuded, eroded slopes throughout its gorgeous mountain ranges, the long-term consequences of a soaring population forced, through decades of governmental neglect and corruption, to eke out a living in ecologically disastrous ways.

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All around us are neat rows of black plastic pots, thousands of them, with tiny lime tree seedlings poking out of the dark soil. The calm focus of the Haitian farm workers carefully watering them makes me think of nurses in a hospital intensive care unit (or a preemie ward). Which is what the Haiti Lime Project in effect is: one of a multitude of lifelines the Clinton Foundation is financing and/or securing financing and partners for in a multiprong effort to help this country, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, stand on its own feet. The partners in this particular endeavor are: Firmenich the Swiss oils and essences company, which will buy the limes the farmers grow at market rates; Acceso which works with Haitian lime producers as well as peanut growers (peanut plants will be "intercropped" with lime trees as another source of revenue and to aid in the renourishing of the soil); and SFA, which will distribute the seedlings and offer technical support to farmers as needed.

"Clinton was the broker," Locke says. "He brought us together." It is the Clinton Foundation way: to build and fast-track creative collaborations between businesses, NGOs, governments, and individuals to address urgent needs in communities at risk. The foundation, the most powerful imagining ever of what a post-presidency can be, currently employs 2,200 people across its various initiatives (including the Clinton Global Initiative), and according to its statistics, CGI members have made 3,100 Commitments to Action in 180 countries, affecting the lives of 430 million people. (In Haiti alone there are currently 30 foundation-supported investments, and 208 Clinton Global Initiative commitments.) And Clinton, now 68 years old and 14 years into his next act, is as fired up about his work as any man could be. "It has been my whole life for longer than I was president," he tells me later. "And we have a huge plate of business to do this year."

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As Clinton's chopper touches down, his shock of white hair is immediately recognizable, like a beacon, amid his entourage. (The group includes Sean Penn, who has his own Clinton Foundation supported project in Port-au-Prince's Delmas 32 neighborhood: the J/P HRO's Community Center and Urban Garden, which we'll visit tomorrow. "Thank you for our very existence in Haiti," Penn will say with emotion to Clinton.) A slow, ritualistic procession ensues, up and down the rows of seedlings. The point seems to be equal parts inspection and conversation, with farmers, community organizers—anyone who is affiliated with the enterprise, who was allowed onto the site, and who has succeeded in getting Clinton's attention. He is generous with it, engaged and in the moment despite the midday sun, which is turning his pale skin pink. He asks questions, listens, nods, touches arms and shoulders—bonding gestures that quickly put his interlocutors at ease in the charmed circle of his celebrity. He is exemplary in his attention to detail, respectful in his curiosity.

Bill Clinton inspecting the Cholera Treatment Center with Sean Penn.

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For all its intimate down-homeness, the visit is carefully orchestrated to project Clinton's message onto a larger stage—in this case the importance to Haiti of small-scale farming and reforestation. The Haitian media have been invited, and they follow Clinton's progress, recording his words and gestures. This flat bit of farmland two hours along bad roads from Port-au-Prince is his pulpit to the Haitian people and to their government and, by extension, its controversial president, former pop star Michel Martelly. His perambulation communicates that this is how it can be done, this works, this will help. A little Haitian girl, hair braided, dressed in what is surely her Sunday best, walks solemnly beside him, too young to understand or care who this big blan is but happily holding his hand. That visual too is a message—we must do this for your children—and a reminder that nothing of lasting value can be achieved without a robust and universal system of education and the empowerment of girls, two other pillars of the Clinton Foundation's work. As Denis O'Brien, the billionaire chairman of Digicel (a telecommunications giant with an extensive footprint in Central America, the Pacific Islands, and the Caribbean), tells me without a trace of irony, "The president is the chief development officer in Haiti."

It has been almost an hour since touchdown, and a little throng has encircled Clinton and is not letting him go.His advance team is starting to sweat, and not just from the heat. There goes the schedule. We have one more site visit today, a foundation-supported agricultural production facility that supplies castor oil for the Kreyòl Essence line of Haitian-produced "eco-luxury" beauty products. (I will witness Bill Clinton, reading glasses on, approvingly scrutinizing the fine print on a jar of made-in-Haiti hair pomade.) And then more events the next day in Port-au-Prince, including the brand new Cholera Treatment Center, a revelatory, architecturally striking model for what a health clinic in the developing world should be, and—the pièce de résistance—the official opening of the gleaming new eight-story, $48 million Marriott, the first internationally branded and managed hotel in Haiti, financed and owned by Digicel, a deal brokered by Clinton and the reason we are all in Haiti at this particular moment.

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"Town & Country!" a Clinton aid shouts in my direction after his boss stops for a brief photo op. "Run! We're going to try and beat the president's helicopter!"

There are countries in the world with crystal clear stories that elevate the spirit and make the heart beat faster: ancient Egypt, with its miraculous monuments and first deeply articulated concept of eternity; classical Greece, the first democracy and creator of humanistic philosophy; America, the still unrivaled land of individual opportunity. And Haiti.

In 1791, in the French Caribbean colony then called Saint-Domingue, black slaves rose up in rebellion, led by four outstanding military leaders, three of whom were former slaves themselves: Toussaint Louverture, Henri Christophe, and Jean-Jacques Dessa-lines (Alexandre Pétion, a free mulatto, was the fourth). After 13 years of brutal fighting they defeated France, Britain, and Spain at the peak of their powers; the last expeditionary force of 22,000 French troops was commanded by none other than Napoleon's brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc. The rebels' victory abolished within Saint-Domingue's borders—and for the first time anywhere—one of the world's great outrages: the murderous exploitation of African slaves. (The French plantation system in Saint-Domingue was especially lucrative and gruesome.) In 1804 the world's first independent black republic was established. As national creation narratives go, it's pretty unbeatable.

But then things largely fell apart. The revolutionary leaders were either killed or died early. (Louverture, the father of the rebellion, perished in a French prison in the Jura Mountains.) The leadership vacuum was exacerbated by a 57-year embargo of the new nation by the colonial powers, including the United States (which did not recognize Haiti until 1862, under Lincoln). Thomas Jefferson had called Louverture's troops "cannibals." The British were likewise not amused; they worried the revolution might spread to Jamaica and its plantation economy, just 119 miles away. Haiti was an inconvenient country.

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"The embargo lasted longer than the Cuban embargo, a very long time for a people just out of slavery," said Max Beauvoir, a former chemical engineer educated in New York and Paris, and a Vodou priest (now the religion's "pope," as he is known), whom I met at his home and temple. "But they survived. It is what is called the resilience of the Haitian people."

Many of Haiti's subsequent problems, to be sure, were not foreign-caused. There were dictatorships and disasters and demented policies, like the late-19th-century governmental get-rich scheme that imposed a heavy export tax on coffee and succeeded in limiting the profits of one of the world's largest coffee industries. (Many of the lovely but decrepit mansions you can see today in Cap-Haïtien, on the north coast—once one of the richest and most important French cities in the Americas—were built by 19th-century coffee exporters.) Bringing back soil-nourishing Haitian coffee production is another Clinton Foundation project (through the La Colombe Coffee Roasters brand).

Tourism, the economic lifeblood of many a Caribbean nation, became in Haiti, for most of the last century, an elite thing, and therefore not particularly revenue-generating. "We were for so long, and still are, in a bubble of negativity," says Jean-Cyril Pressoir, who optimistically founded Tour Haiti in 2005 and who organized my trip. Foreigners who did come were those interested in seeing past the surface shabbiness to the cultural sophistication beneath—artistic, musical, and spiritual—what Maryse Pénette-Kedar, co-founder of Prodev, one of Haiti's largest and most respected NGOs, matter-of-factly calls "a national noblesse, the finesse of people who have no access to anything."

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The visitors—writers and artists and musicians, anthropologists and journalists, development workers and diplomats—generally converged at the bar and on the porch of Port-au-Prince's Oloffson Hotel. Immortalized in Graham Greene's The Comedians as the Trianon, it still stands amid dense tropical vegetation in all its run-down splendor, Vodou-inspired objets scattered about the grounds. "We have a lot of repeats," says its Princeton-educated owner, Richard Morse. "People either want this a lot, or not." Sort of like Haiti.

The hope is that the new Marriott will help counteract some of the reticence. "I want visitors to see Haiti through you, through this hotel," Clinton told the staff during the opening ceremony on the Marriott's vast terrace cum lounge cum palm tree–studded pool area. "If everyone could see this country the way Denis [O'Brien] and I do, you would have many times more visitors flooding in and your incomes would be three times what they are, and we wouldn't have the troubles that we do."

As with any other Clinton Foundation–supported project, the Marriott is not just a hotel but an economic engine meant to move Haiti toward a brighter future. As part of its commitment to the foundation, it procures products locally and employs some 200 Haitians, many of them purposefully culled from Port-au-Prince's marginalized and thought to be unemployable, according to general manager Peter Antinoph. (The staff members are lovely and eager, some still charmingly in training, and they have clearly won the lottery.) The hope, O'Brien tells me in summary, is that the hotel will not just attract tourism but make other foreign investors comfortable and also create a pipeline of Haitian managers who "15 or 20 years from now will open their own places. It's about exposing the talent here." O'Brien pauses. "If you make money in the developing world, you can sleep at night only if you also make a social impact. We do not want to be seen as modern-day conquistadors."

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"I was always interested in Haiti," Clinton tells me during a long and wide-ranging interview in his Harlem office after our return. It was the creation story, "but what really got me fired up was a trip we took in December 1975, after Hillary and I got married. We stayed in Port-au-Prince, in one of those wonderful gingerbread houses, a hotel run by a Viennese couple. Those old houses should be restored! It was near the Oloffson, but we didn't have money for that.

"Clinton bought his first piece of Haitian art then. "Haitians are unusually gifted," he says. "My home today is full of Haitian paintings and metalwork." The Clintons toured the cathedral on that first trip. They watched on Independence Day as the infamous president Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier laid a wreath on the central Champs de Mars at the statue of the Unknown Slave, who is shown blowing a conch shell to summon his brethren to revolution. "I noted the incongruity of that," Clinton says, shaking his head, "because I was standing next to one of the dreaded Tontons Macoutes wearing those dark glasses."

And he learned about Vodou. "I didn't buy all those American zombie movies," he says, clearly fascinated by the topic and by the different expressions the near-universal human belief in a nonphysical spirit force can take. "Hillary and I wanted to understand." That's when the Clintons met Max Beauvoir ("God, he was handsome!" Clinton exclaims), who spent all day explaining Vodou theology to the Clintons and its distant roots in the religion of the Fon people of what is now Benin. The young couple attended a nighttime ceremony. Vodou's central ritual is a dance during which spirits possess believers."I saw some unbelievable things that night. I'll never forget it. And I'm very grateful for that," Clinton says. (So much so that the Beauvoir meeting gets a section in Clinton's 2004 autobiography, My Life.)

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Beauvoir explained something else to Clinton: the social role of the Vodou priest in this culture. "And I'll never forget this, either," Clinton tells me. Beauvoir said to him, "We practice this because it is our faith. But also because there is no government outside of Port-au-Prince; there is no social structure. There is nothing. We have to feed them, we have to give them medicine. We have to take care of the people here."

Since then Clinton has traveled to Haiti 38 times; he was only the second sitting American president to go there (in 1995). In 2009 he was appointed by Ban Ki-moon UN Special Envoy to Haiti after a series of hurricanes had decimated the country's GDP by 15 or 20 percent. A year later, after the earthquake knocked the economy down by two-thirds, he became co-chair, with Haitian prime ministers Jean-Max Bellerive and Garry Conille, of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission. "President [George W.] Bush and I raised about $50 million to promote business development in Haiti. Then I raised another $30 million to promote smaller enterprises that help people at the bottom of the pyramid, educational and healthcare projects. And then there are the commitments made to the Clinton Global Initiative, which within four years will have gotten around $500 million of investment through."

Clinton is proud of that yet unhappy about the country's continuing lack of a national plan. Although it now has one of the fastest-growing economies in the Caribbean, Haiti, he says, "never had a strategy—for social, economic, and educational development, including healthcare. What happens if you don't have systems, predictable rewards for responsible behavior, is that everything becomes a one-off." The Interim Reconstruction Commission was the attempt to create priorities and accountability. Acknowledging that the commission was "incredibly cumbersome," Clinton is nonetheless clearly frustrated that in 2011 it was dismantled by President Martelly. Some of the reasons, Clinton says, "were good, and some probably not so good." Indeed. Martelly, who is four years into a five-year term, is being widely criticized for weakening state institutions, for consolidating power by failing to hold scheduled elections, for corruption, and for being out of touch with Haiti's poor—perhaps another Haitian strongman in the making.

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"But let me tell you a story," Clinton says. I settle in. His stories are long. "Along the road from the Port-au-Prince airport to downtown, there used to be a long metal fence where Haitian street artists hung their paintings for sale. The second time I went back to Haiti in 2010 after the earthquake, just a couple of weeks after, eight of them—eight hardy souls—were back. I was with the UN then, so I had a big old crowd with me, and I said, 'Stop! Everybody get out and everybody buy something. And no bargaining this time. Whatever they ask for, we'll pay. If you don't have any money, I'll pay for it.' I got out and bought a couple of little paintings, and then saw a guy around the corner. 'President Clinton,' he said, 'You bought a painting from me several years ago. I have another.' So I went over, bought the painting, and started talking to the guy. I said, 'I really respect you guys for coming out here so soon.' He said, 'You shouldn't. I have nothing else to do. My wife and children were all killed.' And I said, 'Why are you here?' And he said, 'Because I loved them very much, and this is my way of honoring them. Because we artists, we're family, and they know that if I can be here, they have no excuse not to be. We have to begin again.'

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"It's very important to understand that that is Haiti too," Clinton continues, clearly moved. "You see all the messed-up politics, and all the lack of capacity. And then something like that. That is why you have all these people who fall hopelessly in love with the place and never want to give up on it and are prepared to live with the frustrations. And also to be criticized because we can't work miracles." (Note the "we.") "Because there's no place quite like it on planet Earth."

Clinton is aware that the world at this very moment may be slightly more interested in the political plans of his wife than in his foundation, and he is willing to play a game of If She Does Run. (At press time Hillary Clinton had not announced her decision.) "I think it's important, and Hillary does too, that she go out there as if she's never run for anything before and establish her connection with the voters," he says. "And that my role should primarily be as a backstage adviser to her until we get much, much closer to the election. So our plan is to spend this whole year working on the foundation, which is, by a good long stretch, the most transparent of all the presidential foundations and more transparent than a lot of other major foundations in the country. It should be, both because I believe in it and because Hillary is in public life, and we'll get criticized, as some people are criticizing me, for taking money from a foreign government. We did a review of the whole foundation last year." Clinton is emphatic about this and intent on my noting it. "We got suggestions from a great law firm that also does pro bono counsel for Doctors Without Borders, and we implemented every single one of them."

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And if Hillary does become president? "First, I would have to assess what she wants me to do," he says. "And second, we might have to change the [foundation] rules again. But we haven't talked about that yet, and I don't think we should. You can't. It's hard for any party to hang on to the White House for 12 years, and it's a long road. A thousand things could happen."

Whatever occurs, Clinton's priority is to keep the foundation alive, "whether I'm running it or not. I've told Hillary that I don't think I'm good [at campaigning] anymore because I'm not mad at anybody. I'm a grandfather, and I got to see my grand daughter last night, and I can't be mad."

Perhaps not mad, but still passionate about the problems that concern him. Like Haiti's. "They have to keep welcoming investors. We have to improve the road network. Reforestation has to succeed!" As I'm leaving his office—or, at least, trying to leave—the president doesn't want to let it go. "Did you see the Citadelle, near Cap- Haïtien?" He is referring to the largest and best preserved of a network of some 25 mountaintop fortresses conceived by Henri Christophe in the event of a French return to Haiti. It is shaped like the prow of a giant ship. I had. "It's the most impressive architectural achievement in the Caribbean," he enthuses. "It is breathtaking! And the idea that it was built in the early 1800s, designed by someone who not only did not have a degree in architecture but had no university degree—they imagined it and they built it!" A Clintonian accolade if ever there was one. And not unlike a foundation built by a former president.

The keys to visiting Haiti are a well- organized itinerary, a car and driver, and a guide. Jean-Cyril Pressoir of Tour Haiti will set you up brilliantly (info@tourhaiti.net; lojistik.haiti@gmail.com; 509-3711-1650).

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